Mock Essay

Media Essay

Analyse the way in which the media represents youths

“Media appears to reflect reality whilst in fact they construct it” – David Gauntlett mentioned this in reference to youths. This suggests that the current and proliferating society that we continue to live in is highly saturated by the media and their representation of youths as social group.

Thus for youths identity is complicated. The relationship between collective identity and media representation is not and will never be straightforward. Stuart Hall mentioned “media appears to reflect reality whilst in fact they construct it”. This statement is indeed true because we see that in today’s society they tend to link youths with a moral panic especially since the London 2011 riots.

Stuart hall encoding/decoding states how the media gather information and represents it to their audience. This is through the use of tabloids especially during the London riots. The daily mail newspaper mentioned this of a group of youths “A sense of glee pervaded these accounts – youths were often grinning while describing their experience – a delight that the normal order of things was turned upside down.” This is proof that in fact the portrayal in tabloids newspapers are often exaggerated to the furthest degree as class youths as not being govern and carless as they are essentially a form of light entertainment as opposed to broadsheets which tends to be more factual and thus is a reflection whereas a tabloid is constructions as its constructs a moral panic.

The reason being is because the guardian a broadsheet in fact represents youths differently from that of a tabloid sheet. The guardian mentioned “just imagine for a moment that you’re a British teenage boy. You’re struggling to grow up, to find out who you really are?” which is in fact true as youths today are trying to find their identity.

However because newspapers are generally given out to the majority of lower class/ middle class citizens, who read tabloids rather than broadsheets, youths in Britain are now classified with moral panic stating things such “The brazen facebook user posted a picture of himself with suspected goods” the word brazen itself just indicates to its readers that young people are not longer governed and are in fact careless and heartless.

This thus links to Althusser’s interpellation theory, the fact that it represents human subjects in this case youths are constructed by pre-given structures. This has been taken up by the media in a form of television, web 2.0, or tabloids/ broadsheets to impose their ideology on the audiences. Thus if we think about it, were bombarded by messages from the media, messages that make certain assumptions for us, and as soon as we engage with the message we are positioned as a ‘subject’ rather than an individual. The idea is that we are controlled y these messages and go some way to defining our or anyone’s identity.

This is in fact linked to youths through the use of media and their ideology they have somewhat positioned youths as a collective identity, whom are careless, not governed and give out a sense of moral panic. Through the use of Web 2.0 such as:

·         Facebook

·         Twitter

·         Tumblr

·         YouTube

We have been able to see that youths have been able to use all this to form to that collective identity rather than an individual.

Thus in conclusion the way the media represents youths is complicated as the media, either reflects or constructs an identity for youths thus enabling youths to form a collective identity based on pre –given constructions. Thus we allow the media to form and shape our reality.